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> I still much prefer the concept of having the CPAN installer "co-ordinate" with other platform-specific binary package installers.

I.e. ask dpkg, ask rpm, ask Windows installation machinery/registry, etc. whether this external application/library/developer SDK has been installed, etc. In itself that is not very hard: packaging tool specific plugings (query/install/uninstall) and then a large database of mappings (what is this package called under this packaging tool, and how is this package distributed

> This, indeed, was the original idea of the Alien:: namespace. I should know, I was in the meeting where this idea was discussed.

I find this odd though, because I've never seen any of this.

Based on what was uploaded to CPAN, I had come to see Alien:: as "We need this one specific thing really bad, so any evil thing you have to, just get it installed".

I never really saw it as something that co-ordinates with various platform-specific backends.

If so, I would have expected some to see some sort of Install::Binary::Driver::DebianApt type structure be implemented somewhere that the Alien:: module does a build_requires: dependency on... some combination of platform detection and platform-specific drivers.

Not this current situation where everything is lumped into the Alien:: module, which seems to be to appropriate for last-resort installation, but entirely inappropriate for large scale rollout.

So how long have you been around this community, anyway?:-) Just kidding. Kind of.

That was the idea as I remember it. Maybe I didn't communicate it clearly enough. Maybe some other idea was thrown around that stuck more in people's minds. Maybe I should have followed up on the idea to produce actual implementations so that there would have been a precedent. I don't know.

But I still think it's a good idea. Instead of trying to be essentially

Somehow, strangely, this was already fixed...maybe I did it
subconsciously, maybe there are helpful little gnomes running around
in the repository and fixing bugs while we sleep, I don't know..
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi

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